ONE.
happy first birthday to our favorite miracle baby
It’s been a year since our little extra chromosome girl was born.
She woke up next to us this morning, flashed her huge gummy smile and did her little excited wiggle, and Ben said “it’s a beautiful day, just like the day you were born!” Indeed. Sunshine, a gentle breeze, not a cloud in the sky. Ben and his mom were laying sod, and I went to town “real quick” for my 40 week midwife appointment. I had no idea it would be fourteen days before I’d come home again.
But here we are, one year later. God has been so gracious to us. Willaby is thriving! She’s eating real food, almost crawling, and scooting all around the house and backyard. We seriously love her to pieces. She still uses oxygen from time to time while sleeping, if she’s got a respiratory bug. And she still sleeps with us most of the night because I can’t leave her to cry for very long, and I’m her only comfort :) But that’s ok. The Lord has supernaturally kept my energy up, despite 365 days without sleeping through the night. I am so grateful.
Willaby has made me more patient, tender, gentle, and hopefully less selfish. (Being a parent is hard—it’s harder when you’re selfish.) So I’m thankful for all the ways the Lord has seen fit to smooth my edges. He continues to work on this work-in-progress, and Willaby is a gracious tool :)
In honor of her life, I’d like to reshare the story of her birth. Without further ado…
May 23, 2025
I was life flighted to our region’s “bigger” hospital yesterday, on my due date, and after much monitoring and a dose of supernatural peace chose to have a c/section.
Here’s the story:
I have been having prodromal labor for about three weeks, so since about 37 weeks. This is pretty normal for me, but during this particular pregnancy, I have just felt really anxious about giving birth at home and the pain of it. For whatever reason I couldn’t stop thinking about the pain. I began to ask friends to pray for a pain-free, birth and supernatural peace about going into labor whenever it happened. I had been feeling very anxious because you just never know when labor is going to start, and I don’t like not knowing.
With most of my babies, I have only ever measured at 35 weeks, no matter how far along I am. They just drop really low into my pelvis toward the end so I don’t measure full term, even if I am past my date.
At 39 weeks, I had my midwife check me during a routine appointment because I felt like I was dilating. I was about 1 cm and negative one station. I could feel her head when I checked myself. So she was right there. However, at this appointment, I was only measuring 32 weeks, down from 34 weeks the week before, so my Midwife asked if I wanted to get a growth scan just to make sure that everything was on track.
That night, I told Ben I “wouldn’t mind” if the scan revealed that I needed to head straight to the hospital for a c/s. I told him I didn’t want it to be emergent but if they told me “baby should really come out today,” I was totally willing to do a c/s. I was halfway kidding but also kind of not. I had this really weird peace about choosing a c/s versus my planned home birth, which is a HUGE departure from my general philosophy about birth and from my personal preferences for my births (unmedicated, no interventions, not even a saline locked IV for my first 2 in the hospital, etc.)
I went the next day for an ultrasound, and the baby was measuring about 6 lbs. 14 oz. and looked good. She was only measuring at the size of 37 weeks gestation, so generally small but proportional in all of her parts, so they were not concerned about growth problems. My fluid was kind of low.
This unexpected ultrasound was my first indication that maybe my gut instinct was right and my anxiety was present for a good reason. Even though everything looked good, I just was feeling like I might end up needing an elevated level of care. But I did not want to say that to anyone, because I thought I was probably just overthinking it and did not want to alarm people unnecessarily. AND, I had done the scan and checked the boxes so I didn’t have any justification for being concerned.
A week went by, and yesterday, Thursday, was my routine 40 week appointment with my midwife. I left the kids at home with Ben and his mom, because they were putting in our new yard, and I took Phineas to town with me. My grandma was not supposed to be home, so I thought it would just be me and the Midwife and Phineas. My plan was to do the appointment quickly and then go run errands and head back home.
My grandma happened to be home, which is the first miracle of the day.
My Midwife did my appointment as usual, and I was actually measuring back up to 35 weeks, which was interesting. That meant that baby went back up again. Then she started listening to the heart rate and it was in the 120s without accelerations. She asked if I had eaten yet and I told her that I had brought my lunch with me but had not eaten breakfast, except my 16 ounces of raw milk. It was about 1 o’clock at this point so she wanted me to eat my sandwich and grapes and then check the heart rate again. She said sometimes babies get a slow heart rate when their blood sugar is low because their mom has not eaten.
So I ate while we talked about other things, and when she rechecked the heart rate, it was in the 60s. Click. Click. Click. Not good. She had me stand up to make sure she was hearing correctly, and then said “we need to go.” I threw on my shoes, asked my Grandma to keep Phineas (thank God she was home,) and Amie raced me to the hospital while I called 911 to have them alert the hospital I was on my way. Our hospital does not have OBGYN services or a birthing unit, so there is literally nothing they can do for a baby in distress if the baby needs to come out. I knew this, but we wanted to go there anyway so that I could get a helicopter out.
I then called Ben and he told me our local hospital (where he works) would not be able to help me, but again, we said we wanted to go there because it would be faster to get a helicopter than to just start driving to the hospital an hour away. He then told me he was on his way (left the kids with his mom—miracle #2 that she happened to be at our house bc otherwise he would have had to load the kids in his truck and bring them.) We live about 25 minutes from our local hospital, but my grandma only lives five minutes from it so Amie and I were there in five minutes.
Our good friend was the doctor in the emergency room, and he put me on ultrasound right away. Baby’s heart rate was back in the 140s, so we all breathed a sigh of relief for the moment. But Amie kept her Doppler on me and was catching many, many decelerations down into the 70s to 90s for periods of time. This was not good. Baby was stressed for some reason and I was not in active labor.
We asked for oxygen because that’s really the only thing they could do, and we asked them to activate life flight so I could get out of our hospital and get to the bigger hospital where I could be continuously monitored and make other decisions. They do not have a continuous monitor at our local hospital.
Ben arrived, and the helicopter was there 13 minutes later. Ben walked with us as they wheeled me up to the roof. The Lifeflight nurses were absolutely wonderful but again, nothing they could do besides oxygen. The flight took about 13 minutes, and it was all I could do to pray the breath of Jesus into my baby, because I didn’t know whether she was still alive. I just trusted she was. I did finally feel her move slightly once, thank God.
We arrived at the bigger hospital, and they hooked me up to monitoring immediately. Her heart rate was ok again but still with consistent decelerations. I was 4cm dilated but not contracting meaningfully.
The staff were absolutely wonderful. I was truly not prepared for how flexible and understanding they would be. Even though I’m a nurse, my experience with the medical world is that providers are often pushy and don’t take my preferences seriously. The doctor was SO kind, patient, steadfast, and flexible. He was of the “watch and wait” mentality, so that’s where we did.
After about an hour of her doing the same thing, we discussed my options. Because the midwives’ brew is typically so effective for me, we figured that any sort of small intervention would kick me into full-blown labor. Especially since I was already 4 cm dilated. My options were Pitocin or having my water broken. Both the OB and my Midwife agreed that Pitocin would be much more gentle, because once the water is broken, you lose the cushion. My water has never broken during labor—I have always broken it during pushing—so I did not want to break it artificially.
So we decided to get me settled into a room and start Pitocin at 2. We all figured that would be enough to kick me into labor.
After quite a while, my contractions were not more meaningful, and I was not dilating. We turned up the Pitocin and waited some more. The whole time, baby girl was having hardly any accelerations. She was “flat,” which is an indicator of high stress. Basically, she was hunkering down and trying to protect herself for whatever reason. And then she was still having decelerations as well.
They did a bunch of labs and could not come up with any indication of why she was so stressed. However, after watching her strip for quite some time, I was just convinced that she was not going to tolerate actual labor. If she couldn’t even tolerate my contractions that weren’t even strong, how was she going to tolerate real contractions?
I had them check me again, and I was still only 4 cm and she was now at a -3 station. So she had gone higher in my uterus, up under my ribs, instead of coming down to compress my cervix. In order to kick myself into labor, she would’ve had to come all the way down and start compressing my cervix. And it was clear that for whatever reason she was unwilling to do that and was instead protecting herself way up high. And remember, she had been down at a negative one a week before. So something happened to make her go back up and not come back down. Which is abnormal for me. Once my babies come down, they stay down.
We kept watching, and I could see five other strips of other women/babies on my monitor. Not one of them looked like mine. They all had very nice wave forms up and down. Mine was quite literally almost a flat line. Not to mention about every 10 minutes, she would dip down below 90 again and I would have to change position (like flip to my hands and knees with my head down) and put oxygen on to try to get her heart rate to come back up. She always recovered, but the question was— for how long would she do that? For how long would she keep recovering? At what point would she just become too tired and not recover from her decelerations…and then it would be a true emergency C-section under general anesthetic.
I kept consulting Ben, Amie, and my beloved birth photographer (who had the same thing happen with her first baby!) as well as the doctor, but I had made up my mind: I wanted to CHOOSE a c/s and not have it chosen for me in an emergency. Why prolong what seemed to be inevitable? Baby clearly wasn’t tolerating even not-labor, and she wasn’t descending into my pelvis, so I was convinced that turning up the pitocin would just stress her out more and we’d have a serious problem on our hands. I did not want to attempt real labor, have her get seriously stressed, and then have to have an emergency c/s.
With a lot of tears but perfect peace and supernatural resolve, I just KNEW I needed to do a c/s and get her out. No one knew WHY she was so stressed, but it very clearly felt like the answer was to quit waiting to see how much more stressed she might get…
Incredibly, I had just sent my friend Daisy 6 minutes worth of voice memos the day before telling her about an epiphany I had while driving. It was as if the Lord told me that, while unmedicated birth is the pinnacle of empowerment (hate that word but don’t know what else to call it) and “life changing” for so many women, the pinnacle FOR ME would actually be choosing a c/s because it would take so much supernatural strength to do so. Just like unmedicated birth takes supernatural strength for other women (and for me too, don’t get me wrong.) Choosing a c/s is the very last thing I would do in my own strength. If that was ever going to happen, GOD would have to supply me the strength to choose it.
So I called the (very patient) doctor in, and told him I was ready. He smiled, and everyone else breathed a sigh of relief.
They moved quickly. I was in the OR within a few minutes, the spinal (not epidural, yay!) went perfectly, and I didn’t feel a thing. They played Joey and Rory’s Hymns album for me, and Ben came in and prayed with me. Kari was there taking photos.
She was born at 7:12pm, after about 6 hours of decelerations and “being flat.”
She cried immediately, but her oxygen saturations were poor, so they were only able to delay cord clamping for about 45 seconds. They waited as long as they could, and I was so grateful for their attempt.
They gave her some breaths, but she still wasn’t responding (heart rate was great, work of breathing was fine, sats were very low,) so they put her on CPAP and took her to the NICU for 4 hours of observation to see if she could get onto room air. On their way out the door, the nurse said, “do you want to see your baby?” and held her up so I could get one quick glance.
Kari stayed with me and held my hand. She was a total unexpected Godsend—birth photographer turned right-hand support woman and friend. Ben went with the baby.
After recovery, I headed to the NICU and asked them to put her on my chest. They did for as long as she could tolerate it, but her oxygen eventually dropped again.
She was admitted to the NICU at that point, as she is unable to be on room air. We still aren’t sure why. Ben stayed with her all night and held her on and off and slept by her side. I was able to pump colostrum, which they fed her via syringe and a tube down her nose. Poor thing. She can’t latch because of the CPAP on her face. So a tube it is. Because she’s not suckling, she’s not keeping her blood sugar up, so I chose a D5 fluid IV (vs formula or donor milk,) as I’d like her to only have MY milk if possible. They have been super understanding of that.
Ben came to see me for like 5 min this morning to charge my phone and said “I need to get back to her.”
And I told him he could shower down here or go home to sleep and he said “no, I’m staying with her. There are too many lonely babies in there.”
He’s the best dad and husband.
Since she is still in the NICU and unable to maintain her oxygen, I feel VERY confident that a c-section was the right choice for this baby. I feel assured that she wouldn’t have tolerated strong
contractions, since she was stressed without them and is having a hard time even now.
We still aren’t sure why. We are meeting with the neonatologist at 10am to figure out next steps and what tests we’d like to do to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
Please pray for us and her and the whole team. They are really wonderful people, and we feel we are in the best hands. We also very clearly feel the Lord saved her life with Amie catching those 60s in a regular appointment, and we feel confident He will continue to go before us.
Willaby Jean Pope
6# 14 ounces
5/22, 7:12pm
Jean means “God is gracious.” And He is.
I can attest…He still is.
The screen is all blurry🥹